And, of course, he wanted to support free speech – “while balancing it with the safety of our users”. He vowed to provide “greater transparency” on the company’s content rules. And in his attempt to “manage” the controversy, Spotify’s co-founder Ek consulted the Facebook playbook. I mean to say, a hundred million bucks is a lot of money, even in the debased currency of the tech industry. Whatever you might say about Facebook, one thing it does not do is pay its users for what they post on its platformįaced with these ultimatums, why did Spotify do? You only have to ask the question to know the answer. “I am doing this,” he wrote, “because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines, potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.” Shortly afterwards, Joni Mitchell announced that she was taking the same line. The musical superstar Neil Young gave the company an ultimatum: it could have his music or Joe Rogan’s podcast but not both. The complainants especially objected to an episode that had featured Robert W Malone, a medical researcher whom Twitter had permanently suspended from its platform, citing “repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy”, together with a comment Rogan made where he stated that he believed that young, healthy people do not need a Covid-19 vaccine.Īt this point, Spotify experienced a sudden collision between its interests in music and podcasting. In January this year, an episode of the Rogan show prompted an open letter signed by 270 health care professionals calling on Spotify to develop a counter-misinformation policy on the platform.
And in May 2020 the company persuaded the popular American comedian Joe Rogan to move his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, exclusively to Spotify in return for a reported $100m. In 2009, for example, it was reported that Lady Gaga’s hit song Poker Face had been streamed 1m times on Spotify, for which she received the princely royalty of $167! In May 2015, Spotify, seeing that Apple and Amazon were getting into the music streaming business, decided that it was also going to diversify into podcasts. Given its dominance in the distribution of music, Spotify has inevitably been at the centre of controversies about the royalties musicians get paid for having their work streamed on the platform.
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